I spent four years as Forbes' Girl Friday, which to me meant doing a little bit of everything at once. As a member of the Forbes Entrepreneurs team, I looked at booming business and startup life with a female gaze. I worked on the PowerWomen Wealth and Celebrity 100 lists, keeping my ears pricked and pen poised for current event stories--from political sex scandals to celebrity gossip to international affairs. In 2012 I helped to put two South American women on the cover of FORBES Magazine: Modern Family star Sofia Vergara (the top-earning actress on U.S. television) and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is transforming the BRIC nation into an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Prior to Forbes I was at the Philadelphia CityPaper, where I learned more than any girl ever needs to know about the city's seedier trades. I studied digital journalism at The University of The Arts.
I left Forbes in November, 2013, to pursue other interests on the West Coast.

Double-Standards: How Etsy Upped Its Female Engineers By 500%

Women make up 80% of Etsy shop owners, 80% of its customers and after some serious head-scratching, just 20% of its engineering staff.

At a recent First Round Capital summit Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea surveyed the room: “Raise your hands if there is not a single woman in your company’s engineering team.” The lecture hall shifted uncomfortably and nearly half its hands went up.

Elliott-McCrea smiled. At Etsy, where women account for 80% of its customers, after a two-year-long initiative focused on gender diversity, he had successfully changed the ratio. At the time of the presentation, Etsy had far surpassed industry norms, boasting 20 female engineers on a 110 person team, and was celebrating growth of more than 500%.

How? By revamping recruiting tactics to attract and develop female technical talent. In essence, by hiring like girls.

“Three years ago we decided to rebuild engineering at Etsy from scratch,” Elliott-McCrea says. While there were concerns about the talent pool overall—“we wanted to be kickass and flexible”—gender diversity was a particular focus. At a company so female-focused in its consumer-facing product he describes disappointment at the state of the Etsy office. Low-paid admin girls on one side, well-paid tech guys on another. The engineering staff was a blight at just 4% women.

Elliott-McCrea insists it wasn’t for lack of trying. “We don’t think hiring women engineers [means they are] chromosomally more connected to the product,” he says, but given their user base Etsy foresaw a valuable shared experience between site developers and users. Still, something wasn’t working. “We’d interviewed people, sent out offers and beat the pavement to find female engineers.” No luck.

As CTO Elliott-McCrea identifies as a numbers and results-driven kind of guy, so he says it wasn’t long before a pattern began to emerge. The following is lifted from the First Round Ventures presentation:

Simply saying that you value diversity internally isn’t enough – there’s just no reason for an outside observer to believe you if they come and see a scarcity of women in the organization.

Women tend to be more conservative about switching jobs, especially if they’ve had a negative experience in the past with an employer. You need to show why your company is a great place to work and a great place in particular for a woman to work.

Lowering standards is counter-productive – the idea that “it’s hard to hire women engineers therefore we won’t hold them to such a high standard” is noxious. It reinforces the impression that women aren’t good at engineering which is obviously a downwards spiral.

Most technical interviews suck – fundamentally interviewers ask the question, “Quick, prove to me how smart you are!” “Smart” is not optional. “Quick” and “prove to me” are very rarely actually part of the job and you’re interviewing for the wrong thing – which generally sets up women for failure in the process.

In other words, hiring women engineers is hard. Especially if you hire them like men. “Don’t lower standards,” Elliott-McCrea says, but isn’t exempting women from the same brutal challenge-based interviews their male colleagues undergo doing just that? While I applaud Etsy for its single-minded dedication to increasing gender diversity in its ranks, instead of feeling uplifted by Elliott-McCrea’s presentation I find myself stuck on the question: Is hiring women as women just PC pandering?

In the end, Etsy bolstered its female ranks by offering $5,000 grants to NYC-based education program Hacker School, a move that raised its own “is this sexist?” alarm on the web. A commenter in a Hacker News thread last Spring made the point clearer than most: “I do know that belittling people and playing ‘white man’s burden’ on them makes them feel disadvantaged and marginalized,” he wrote about the female-focused initiative. “I see that behavior coming through here; good intentions, bad secondary consequences.”

Nevertheless, after two years, female engineers at Etsy are nearly 20% of the team, four and a half times what they numbered at the start of the initiative. When reached for comment, Etsy’s corporate communications would not comment on the current number of female engineering staffers, but told FORBES that the coming months would see the company making women a even bigger priority, particularly in the wake of the media coverage sparked by Elliott-McCrae’s presentation. After all, roughly 80% of the over 800,000 shops on the site are owned and operated by women. At a certain point, they should be represented from within the company’s ranks.

Etsy’s commitment to equality should be slow-clapped. Even while we question whether it somehow undermines female engineers as it boosts them up its ranks, the fact remains that they’re succeeding where others have not. Clearly the crafters aren’t the only company struggling with the XX predicament.

In a recent contributor post titled “The Real Reason There Aren’t More Women In Tech,” Martha Heller, author of The CIO Paradox and principal in her own recruitment firm says there continues to be a major chasm between companies actively seeking female talent and women who say they continue to be without work.

“I’m going to say 80% of the searches that we do whether they’re at the CIO level or at the VP or director level, will say to us, ‘If you could get us a woman that’d be really great,’” she said. “But the women I talk to are asking but not getting those opportunities internally. So somewhere there’s a serious disconnect – where on one hand you’ve got women saying we’re not being considered and on the other, companies saying we want women.”

But are cash-rewards or pinkifying the recruiting process the answer? While Etsy pats itself on the back I’ll be sitting here still scratching my head. Is reverse sexism in recruiting to reverse sexism in a company’s ranks a case of the ends justifying the means?

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Very interesting article, Meghan. I think the piece that is missing is not only to focus on the recruiting experience, but the actual culture that women engineers are hired into. I have been a woman in tech for almost 20 years, and have watched many women either decide not to take the job or leave soon after they start because of the culture. It’s admirable that Etsy is working hard to improve their numbers, but the answer doesn’t lie only in getting women in the door, it lies in creating a culture that women want to work in.

Very nice article, Meghan. Thank you. One of the things I didn’t see was salary. Are women engineers being paid as much as men? I’m still hearing that women are making about 80% of what men are making.

You say it’s the culture, but I think that’s a pretty vague, catch-all reason to use. That could mean a whole hoarde of things… so what is it about the culture that’s troublesome for women?

I’ll admit, deciding to be child-free helps me over some (okay, a lot) of the hurdles confronted by women in tech. It’s not a decision I made to get ahead, but with kids, there’s only so many hours in the day to stay on top of the ever-changing technology. Especially in web development, where I’m at right now, the game is always evolving. Self-education takes a lot of free time. Only way to overcome that is to get dads more involved, and when workplaces in the US give more free reign to moms than dads, that’s putting both sides at a disadvantage.

If the culture problems are extended to include, say, crude jokes… eh, I’ve heard my fair share. Tech jobs attract a lot of socially awkward young men who, in my experience, don’t mean any harm. They literally don’t think, especially not like we do. Rather than get bent out of shape, I am more than happy to jump in and reciprocate. It’s only a problem when the guys don’t feel like they can joke around with me because, y’know, feminists and lawsuits. I’d prefer an “all in it together” atmosphere than a defensive “us vs them atmosphere.”

Meghan – Changing the interview process is exactly the point. Why? You quote First Round Ventures’ view that, “quick” and “prove it to me” are rarely part of the job. So why interview for these qualities? Having more women in key roles is not the end goal, but one strategy among many, for changing the culture of business. The very culture that brought us the economic debacle of 2008. The interview process, and more, needs to change, but not just for women, for everyone.

Meghan – Changing the interview process is exactly the point. Why? You quote First Round Ventures’ view that, “quick” and “prove it to me” are rarely part of the job. So why interview for these qualities? Having more women in key roles is not the end goal, but one strategy among many, for changing the culture of business. The very culture that brought us the economic debacle of 2008. The interview process, and more, needs to change, but not just for women, for everyone. g the culture of business. The very culture that brought us the economic debacle of 2008. The interview process, and more, needs to change, but not just for women, for everyone.

Thanks Meghan. Really interesting article. Diversity initiatives are imperfect; but they can be extremely useful for organizations to determine whether the way they done things in the past is the best way to do them going forward (for the underrepresented groups as well as the majority). Hopefully, Etsy is questioning whether their “standards” are actually standards of excellence or standards of the status quo. This will benefit women AND men.

Interesting article! I personally feel that even an 80%/20% split across binary genders is still completely abysmal, but not completely unexpected given the sexism inherent to STEM fields in general, which is pretty adept at turning away women.

I wanted to point out that “woman” and “XX” are not synonymous, and it’s kind of cissexist to use the two interchangeably; it also erases the existence of XY cis women (due to CAIS or other conditions), as well as any other woman who does not have exactly two X chromosomes.

As a student in that batch of Hacker School and current employee of Etsy I can say with certainty there was nothing “pinkified” about the interview process. I was interviewed for over 5 hours. I pair-programmed on difficult projects with engineers on several teams. The point is, white-boarding and “quick! show me how superficially you understand an algorithm!” kind of interviews don’t equal qualified candidates. It’s not a good indication of how an engineer will work day-to-day.

To me, the “cash reward” was a sincere and open invitation and I took it.